Page 54 of Auctioned To Be Mine

She looked over at me. “What? Start dinner? You mean order dinner.”

“No, I mean cook dinner. Come on, you can sit at the island while I cook.”

“Cook? With the oven? And food?”

I laughed. “That’s usually how that works.”

“You cook?”

“Don’t sound so shocked.”

“Don’t you have a chef or a housekeeper?”

“I have a meal prep service.”

I pulled the chicken breasts from the refrigerator and set them on the cutting board while Victoria settled onto the barstool across the island. I could feel her watching me with open skepticism, like she was waiting for me to pull out a phone and dial for delivery.

“You’re really going to cook,” she said. It wasn’t quite a question anymore.

“I really am.” I pulled out the breadcrumbs, the eggs, the flour. Set them up in three shallow bowls the way my mother had taught me when I was about twelve and decided I wanted to learn. “Breaded chicken. Rice. Vegetables. Nothing fancy.”

“That’s actually fancy compared to what I was going to eat tonight.”

“The sad salad again?”

“Leftover rice from a takeout container.”

I shook my head and started pounding the chicken flat between two sheets of plastic wrap. There was something about the physical repetition of it that I genuinely liked. Cooking was one of the few things in my life where the process mattered as much as the result. And maybe I did like whacking things. I made a mean pork chop as well.

“You look like you know what you’re doing,” she said, sounding genuinely surprised.

“My mother taught me.” I moved the flattened chicken to the flour bowl and started dredging. “She made all of us learn. She learned from a chef she hired to come into the house and teach her. She had this glamorous public image, but at home, she was all about being a mom.”

“All of you?” Victoria propped her elbow on the island and rested her chin in her hand. “How many kids are there?”

“Enough that dinner was always loud.” I dipped the floured chicken into the beaten egg and then pressed it into the breadcrumbs. “Drew burns everything he touches. Cleo is actually pretty good. The others—Hollis, Micah, Beau, and Jeremy—are somewhere in between.”

“Where do you fall on the spectrum?”

“Somewhere above Cleo and below my mother.” I set the first piece aside and started on the second. “Mom could cook for twenty people without breaking a sweat and make it look like she’d been doing nothing all day.”

Victoria smiled. “My mother couldn’t boil water. We had a chef. Two of them, actually. One for weekdays and one for weekends because apparently they had different specialties. And if she was hosting a party, there was another chef.”

She talked about everything from her former life with a matter-of-fact tone. There was no nostalgia or bitterness. Just an old life.

While I waited for the pan to warm up, I got the rice started in the pot beside it. The vegetables were already washed and waiting in a colander in the sink.

“Does it bother you?” I asked. “Talking about it?”

She looked up from her notebook. “Talking about what?”

“Where you came from.” I kept my eyes on the oil in the pan. “Your family.”

She shrugged. “No,” she said finally. “It used to. Someone would mention a restaurant I used to go to all the time and I’d feel this weird grief that I couldn’t explain. But it wasn’t like I missed the restaurant. It was a version of me I missed, but I wasn’t sad about it.” She paused. “But that version of me wasn’t actually happy. So the grief was always a little hollow.”

I laid the first piece of chicken in the pan. “That makes sense,” I said.

“I think I miss my closet the most,” she said.